By The Supreme Court on Friday cleared the Trump administration to resume expanded citizenship checks of voter rolls, handing the president an election-security victory weeks before the November midterms and putting a Biden-appointed judge’s nationwide restrictions on hold.
The court’s conservative majority prevailed 6-3, granting the Justice Department’s emergency request to restore access to an expanded federal database that allows states to compare voter registration information with federal citizenship records. The majority concluded that the challengers’ arguments were likely to fail because federal law expressly authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to obtain citizenship and immigration-status information from other agencies, including the Social Security Administration. The litigation will continue.
The dispute involves the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, known as SAVE, which DHS overhauled last year to permit bulk searches and queries using Social Security numbers. Republican-led states subsequently used the system to check voter files, with some registrations canceled after individuals were flagged as possible noncitizens.
Friday’s action suspends the restrictions imposed by U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who blocked the expanded citizenship database in June. Sooknanan, appointed by former President Joe Biden, concluded that the administration had violated privacy protections and relied on information that could incorrectly identify American citizens as ineligible voters.
“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. “This court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
The ruling comes against the backdrop of the broader Republican push for citizenship verification through the SAVE Act and the subsequent SAVE America Act. Despite the shared acronym, the federal database and the legislation are separate measures. The SAVE America Act would require documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration and photo identification for voting in federal elections, while also directing states to check voter rolls against DHS records.
That legislative fight has exposed divisions among Republicans over how aggressively to confront Democratic opposition. In March, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas endorsed changing Senate procedures if necessary to advance the measure. By June, Trump was calling for the Senate parliamentarian’s removal after she determined that the election provisions did not qualify for passage through budget reconciliation, a route that can bypass the usual 60-vote filibuster threshold.
Republicans argue that prohibiting noncitizen voting means little without reliable mechanisms to enforce the prohibition. Democrats and voting-rights organizations contend that additional requirements can burden eligible Americans. Noncitizen voting prosecutions and guilty pleas have given supporters concrete examples of failures in existing safeguards, although those cases do not establish widespread fraud.
In the database case, challengers say outdated records have caused naturalized Americans to be identified as noncitizens even after they became eligible to vote. They cited a Travis County, Texas, election official who reported that 25 percent of the system’s noncitizen matches involved people who had already documented their citizenship, along with news accounts finding that at least 81 percent of responses in St. Louis County, Missouri, were incorrect. Those local figures do not establish a nationwide error rate, which has not been made public.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which represents the plaintiffs, called Friday’s ruling “profoundly disappointing,” saying it puts Americans “at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by the court’s two other liberal justices, argued that “the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take.”
The administration has defended the expanded system as a tool for protecting election integrity, and Texas, which intervened in its support, has disputed claims that the database is unreliable. Justice Department lawyers called Sooknanan’s order “indefensible” and argued that it “threatens the integrity” of the midterm elections.
A divided federal appeals court declined to suspend Sooknanan’s ruling on Sept. 4, prompting the administration’s emergency appeal. Friday’s Supreme Court action gives the administration room to resume the expanded checks as the case proceeds, restoring a tool Republicans have sought to help states enforce citizenship requirements before ballots are cast.
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